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Its young population ensures that this dynamic city punches above its weight, writes Evan Costigan

THE WATER IS a frenzy of bubbles when an extensive panel of floodlights flicks on, beaming shafts of light from the bed of the shallow canal. Fully aglow now, the whole surface heaves. Great mounds of water belch and recede. Purple, pink and blue neon, projected from nearby department stores, swirls on the back of this liquid animal. Music bursts forth. Jets of water spear upwards, well past my vantage point on the fourth floor, before arcing back to the rabid water below. This explosive symphony of water, light and music runs for an action-packed few minutes before the canal returns to its former stagnant self in the Canal City shopping complex, a futuristic development entirely at home in Fukuoka city: a vibrant, sophisticated metropolis in the north of the southwesterly Japanese island of Kyushu.